Jason Weathersby and Tom Bondur, two of the authors of Integrating and Extending BIRT, Second Edition, show how to work with some extension points that you might not yet have discovered, in order to create and deploy BIRT designs.

BIRT is an architected tool that uses the Eclipse plug-in framework. This framework allows a developer to customize the tool by using predefined extension points. While most BIRT developers are aware of the major extension points, many little-known extension points can be useful when creating and deploying BIRT designs. In this article, we describe several use cases and show how to implement some of these minor extension points.

NOTE

Click here to download a zip file containing the example files for this article.

Many BIRT articles and books discuss customizing the major extension points for report items, Open Data Access (ODA) drivers, emitters, and charts. Less information is available on the minor extension points. These interfaces generally require very little code to implement. The following table describes the minor extension points covered in this article.

Little-Known BIRT Extension Points

Description

Extension Point

Usage

Script function service

org.eclipse.birt.core.ScriptFunctionService

Extends the Expression Builder function list

Aggregation

org.eclipse.birt.data.aggregation

Extends the list of BIRT aggregate functions

Driver bridge

org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.oda.consumer.driverBridge

Intercepts data-source driver calls

Encryption helper

org.eclipse.birt.report.model.encryptionHelper

Changes the BIRT encryption algorithm

NOTE

This article doesn't discuss all the mechanics of implementing an extension point, but we include several examples to use in constructing an implementation.